The Design and Development of a Mobile Phone Application for STEM based on a Novel Engineering Approach

STEM education provides students with interdisciplinary knowledge to improve problem-solving ability. The purpose of this study is to explore whether students could achieve the goal of STEM education by mobile learning. This study developed a mobile application which was named Borrowing Your Enemy’s Arrows to support mobile learning about science, technology, engineering, and math (STEM). According to the textbooks for Grades 5-7,the teaching content of the APP was designed to help students get a better grasp of teaching contents and to help teachers save time in preparing classes. The central narrative,like cartoon or the dialogue of cartoon is used for APP to bridge the teaching contents. Therefore,learners can construct a real-life situation by App. To inspire learners' interest in STEM courses, the APP used games to test how well students did in learning. A shipbuilding task with the narrative background was set to improve learners' skills and interest in engineering learning. The educator could make the assessment of learners based on all their performance in the process of learning, including the design sketches, final products, the messages from students and the grade of game. For the purpose of improving the APP, teachers and students were interviewed to investigate users’ feedback in this study. Keywords—STEM education, mobile learning, novel engineering


I. INTRODUCTION
By integrating STEM education in science, technology, engineering, and mathematics, students can see the connection of knowledge between dispersed disciplines. By designing good STEM thematic activities, it is possible to increase students' interests and achievements in related disciplines [1].
However, since STEM education is multidisciplinary, it often takes a lot of time to develop a STEM course.
This will prolong the student's study time, and will not achieve the goal of reducing the burden on students.
What is worse, it will cause both students and teachers to feel impatient [2]. In the process of improving the STEM curriculum, some scholars have successively used mobile devices as teaching tools to guide students in autonomous exploration through mobile phones or tablet computers.
In previous studies, many scholars have developed APPs suitable for STEM learning to assist students in learning. Some Italian scholars have developed an application based on artificial intelligence. In the VLE (virtual learning environment), several students form a group and learn through role-play in the style of 3D images. Students in this learning environment will be more interested in participating in the course [3]. In the Science Center, with the help of the staff of the venue, the researchers selected the teaching content and reorganized students into multiple themes. The learners took mobile device to learn. Not only can they get timely feedback, but they can also learn the science center's fusion of STEM. Knowledge and attention are also more concentrated [4]. Digital game-based learning methods have been proved useful in improving students' enthusiasm and promoting learning in a technologically enhanced environment [5].
The International Conference on E-Learning in the Workplace 2018, www.icelw.org IC In order for learners to maintain a sustained focus on STEM courses, stories and novels are often used as one of the forms to guide curriculum progression. The novel engineering integrates engineering education and literacy in school-based curriculum in a new way.
When students read materials (such as stories, novels, etc.) in a literature class, the characters in the novel or story will encounter some problems. Based on the situation of the story, the students can use their own knowledge and skills to complete the engineering design in collaboration with the team and with the support from the teacher to help the story characters solve the problems [6]. Wilson-Lopez and Gregory [7] pointed out that literacy instruction can be used to think deeply about engineering problems at various stages of the design process. Publishing House in order to foster STEM knowledge and skill (see Table 1). The novel project could help students who were afraid of science and engineering disciplines to overcome psychological barriers in order to improve students' interest in learning and participation, and help students who were not interested in Chinese learning to improve their literacy by solving engineering problems [6]. In the game of educational APPs, it was necessary to design clear knowledge instruction and practice to make the game more effective [9], and the test of knowledge was more helpful to students' mastery of knowledge than practical application [10]. In educational games, clear goals, immediate feedback, and appropriate difficulty were preconditions of flow [11]. The players gained knowledge through cartoons, and then they built ships and played games. When they encountered difficulty, they could enter Cartoon to relearn or enter the Think Tank to summarize important knowledge (see Figure 1).  with the requirements of the "zone of proximal development" [12].The virtual character will guide the students through the small tasks step by step. (see Figure 3). And the players were asked to upload a sketch of the design, a picture of artifacts, and their note-taking sheets that were scanned into the devices during the production process in order to evaluate students from different dimensionality.

A. Setting and Participants
A sample of 6 seventh-grade students and four teachers was obtained from a junior high school in Jiaxing, China. The school had not a course about STEM or engineering. The 6 students included 3 male and 3 female students and every gender included high, middle and low grades. The 4 teachers who were at least five years in their respective fields included a computer teacher, a history teacher, a Chinese teacher, and a science teacher.

B. Study Design and Data Collection
This study employed qualitative research method.
Date sources included: interviews, field observations, screen recording and the scores of the Athletics. (1)Interviews

Students and teachers were assigned to play
Borrowing Your Enemy's Arrows for half an hour.
Immediately after it was completed, students and teachers participated in the interviews. The interview protocol of the students (see Table 2 Table 3 presented the score of the Athletics in the screen recording. When the cartoon and the Think Tank were finished for the first time, the students did not complete the task, but most of them were able to complete the task at last. This indicated that the difficulty of the Athletics is appropriate. And the study found that when students failed their first try in the game some of them would go to Cartoon to review or go to Think Tank to learn or do both for a second time.

A. The Score of the Athletics
Different choices were available to individuals (The full mark is 11). In addition to the fact that STEM type apps could help improve students' learning motivation, they also had a positive effect on guiding students to complete STEM contents. However, researchers still needed to develop learning materials to go with the APP (e.g., textbooks, courses, video, toolkit) to support students in learning STEM contents.